


Hymn for the Undead Soldier

by goldfinch



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen, Religious Fanaticism, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Simon was a traitor," the Prophet tells Zoe, skull mask sucking briefly in against his mouth. "Now his task falls to you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hymn for the Undead Soldier

**Author's Note:**

> The Prophet's quote "A nation of sheep..." is from French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, by way of Edward R. Murrow. Anything else that looks like a quote is from the Bible, New Kings James Version.

The Prophet looks different on the telly, squashed into a half-meter by half-meter square, his whole face covered with a mask covered with a skull. It looks too small for him, Zoe thinks. Like someone’s idea of a joke. But the voice is right, low and high at the same time, scraping to a ragged baritone and then rising at the ends of his sentences. He talks about the first Risen, and the Second Rising, about what they can do until next December, when they can try again. He calls her faithful. He calls her his daughter.

"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves," he tells her, mask sucking briefly in against his mouth. "Simon was a traitor. Now his task falls to you."

 

 

 

 

It’s the kind of thing she doesn’t want to talk about over the phone, but she calls Brian to let him know she’s coming. Pulls on her boots, her coat out of habit, and goes out onto the street. It’s cold. She can’t feel it, but there’s a dull sheen of frost on all the cars she passes. Zoe doesn’t remember what the world looked like during the Rising, but imagines it was something like this: quiet streets, empty walkways, dark windows. Like a natural disaster came through, a sickness or silent war, and stole everyone away. Only the Legion shows any real sign of life. There’s a few cars in the car park, and she can see shadows moving behind the half-pulled drapes, the lights inside a soft golden glow on the walkway. Gary’s leaning against the wall just outside the lamplight, watching her as she passes. They’ll have to stop meeting there, now. Can’t be talking about important things with so many living about, not the way things are going politically. Course, it’s no surprise. Give them an inch and they’ll take a god damn mile, and grind you into the dirt while they do it.

Down a side street, six doors down. Brian’s house was his brother’s before the Rising, but now it’s his. He’s tamed the hedges, the roses, planted blue poppies up against the house; there aren’t any flowers now but she knows the leaves, the long slender stems. She doesn’t recognize the roses. Growing up she’d known Brian in that peripheral way you know everyone in a town as small as Roarton, but she’s only started talking to him since the Rising. With his plaid jumpers and his gloomy old-man sense of adventure, he wasn’t the sort she’d have pegged to join the ULA, but he’d fallen in with the rest of them once Simon came to town preaching freedom and liberation.

He answers the door not long after she rings the bell, looking rumpled and a little bleary-eyed, surprisingly human, even without coverup. “Zoe.”

“Have you been _sleep_ ing? No, never mind.” She pushes past him into the house - bland beige walls, couch and chairs that look like he got them all at car boot sales. “Nice furniture.”

Brian trails her, stalls picking at a loose thread at the corner of the couch. “It was my brother’s.” He has been sleeping. There’s a crease across his face where his cheek must have scrunched up against the pillow, and his hair’s sticking up hilariously in the back. She has a sudden urge to reach over and flatten it down again. Most undead sleep for a few hours during the night, but it looks like Brian goes in for late afternoon naps instead. “Has something happened?”

Zoe flattens her mouth against a smile. “I got a message from the Prophet this morning.”

Brian’s head comes up. “He contacted you?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. Who else was he going to talk to here now Simon’s gone?”

“Right. Right. I keep forgetting. Weird, isn’t it?”

Weird. Roarton’s ULA has been floundering for the past couple of days, its members scattered and lost, adrift without Simon’s leadership. Zoe’s mother, an avid gardener, once told her that when you cut the top bit off a tree, it starts growing out instead of up, branches sprawling in every direction but the one they’re supposed to. “We’re better off without him. He’s a traitor to the cause and a coward, the Prophet said so.” She catches the back of the armchair with one hand and then the other. Brian would make a good second-in-command. He’s reliable, and she can talk him into doing things if she has to. “But there’s still hope.”

“For -“

“The Second Rising.” She leans forward. “We’ve got work to do.”

 

 

 

 

She usually only goes in Give Back when she feels she can face their minder without vomiting, which is less and less these days, the more time she spends thinking about what it means for the undead as as race. But all the Prophet’s influence won’t keep her from being sent back to Norfolk if she’s marked a noncompliant. Besides, it’s the easiest way to talk to Simon. So she goes in, with Brian or later, on her own, smiling a close-lipped smile at the minder so she doesn’t feel tempted to bite him, some kid she doesn’t know, with mousy brown hair and a habit of snapping the cattle prod idly on and off, in a way that both irritates her and makes her uneasy.

Today they’re painting over graffiti, which is about the most infuriatingly cyclical thing she’s ever done. It will be back by next weekend, and then they’ll be out here again, painting it over. Signs for gangs that don’t exist in Roarton, fuck your mother, Tom loves Alyssa. I had sex with Lauren Kemply. Kilroy was here with his absurdly long nose, his four-fingered hands, his beaded pinprick eyes.

“This is humiliating,” she says, picking at a bit of old paint with her fingernails. Brian’s beside her, painting in long, even strokes.

“Better than being stuck at the B&B like Ms. Furness.”

“They could at least have us painting over all the graffiti.” She cuts a dark look at their minder. “Pulse-beaters. There’s loads of anti-undead stuff but they’re making us fix this instead.”

It’s all over town, nestled behind wheelie bins and up the sides of alleys, on abandoned buildings and both sides of the bridge out of town. Been there for years, now. Some of it’s from the Rising - Living inside, please help; remove the head destroy the brain; Lizzie, Richard is not your friend - but a lot of it is after. Someone’s spray painted over the sign at the train station so it says Rot-ton instead of Roarton, and the incoming side of the bridge says Beware Rotters. Whenever she goes on her walks she sees it - Rotters are Monsters, Fuck the Rotters; it makes her want to punch something, to scream. This is the world they’re living in now, a place that hates them simply for being what they are. Every narrow-eyed look, every blank, panicked stare, every sneer is someone saying you’re not worth the dirt on my shoe. And Give Back is even worse.

“This can’t keep going on,” she says, under her breath. At her side, Brian looks up, then over her shoulder.

“Hey,” he says, then lifts his chin toward the end of the fence.

Simon’s coming up the street, even later than Zoe was, in his big coat and a light brown sweater pushed up to his chin. “Doctor’s appointment,” he says to the minder as he passes. “Should’ve been in the notes.” He glances toward Zoe. Doesn’t nod or say anything, but Zoe watches as he makes his way toward Kieren.

“Priscilla said they’re living together now,” Brian says. He’s stopped painting, brush loose in his hand.

Zoe snorts. “Yeah, well, glad he can ignore institutionalized oppression now he’s got a boyfriend.” She stares at Simon’s back, stares at Kieren as he smiles. It’s a pleased, fond look she’s seen on his face before, when it was him and Rick and everyone knew but no one said anything. They’re definitely living together. Her mouth opens, teeth scraping on air. She sort of hates Simon now. He’s a traitor and a coward, leaving them alone that day, building up her hopes and then pulling them out from under her feet. No, he’d said. It’s not gonna happen. But he’s the one who recruited her, who made her feel like she was part of something bigger than herself, something more important than whatever she’d been doing with her new life before he walked into it. She remembers standing in Amy’s kitchen the day he’d told her she looked like freedom, how something had swelled up warm and grateful in her chest.

She catches up with him afterward, glancing at Brian to wait. Kieren lingers as well, fingers catching at Simon’s sleeve. “You can head back if you want,” Simon says. “I’ll meet you at the house.”

Kieren pauses. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he says.

A half-smile catches on Simon’s mouth. “Never.” They both turn to watch Kieren tramp off down the street. Stiff awkward legs, stilted gait. He doesn’t look back. Down the length of the fence, then down a side street, where Zoe can see the front end of a truck poking out behind the hedges. It’s Gary’s. Gary, again. Is he following her?

Simon looks at her, but he doesn’t say anything. “Well?”

She swallows down her resentment, down past her heart into her stomach. Nearly chokes, doing it, but her voice is steady when she speaks. “The Prophet said you knew who the first Risen was,” she says. Simon stills, looks at her. Flat eyes, flat mouth, everything smoothed away into whiteness. She’s no better at reading him now than she used to be. “I know you couldn’t do it, but I don’t care why. Just, tell me. I can do it myself. This is important, Simon, you can’t just - this is the most important thing in the _world_ -”

“I don’t know who it is.”

\- What?

Simon’s gaze is long and searching; she remembers him looking like this when he sat in Amy’s living room, leaned forward over his knees to catch her eyes. Tell me how you died. Tell me how you rose. “I only said I did,” he says, “because I wanted the Prophet’s approval. You probably understand that.”

It’s a lie. She knows it’s a lie. He’d gone to London; he’d told them to be ready. When he walked out the door that December afternoon in his funeral suit she’s known in her bones that things were going to be different. They’re going to change things around here, he’d said. She’d believed him.

“You liar!” she yells after him as he turns. “You traitor! Who are you protecting?” The minder’s staring at her, hand uncertain on the cattle prod, and she lunges forward just to make him jump. “What,” she says, “scared? You should be.”

“Zoe.” Brian puts a hand on her arm, at her elbow. “It’s okay,” he tells the minder, “it’s fine, really.”

She sees the kid making a note on his clipboard as she turns, and she bares her teeth at him. She knows what it says, or near enough as to make no difference - fuck him, too.

 

 

 

 

There are forests around Roarton, past the fence on the opposite side of town as the train station, with slim trees that cluster closer together the further they get from the hills and the gorge where the river runs thin and fast, even in winter. That’s where Brian finds the two undead. Only one at first, he says, and that one ambling unsteadily away toward the river, but then he saw a flash of grey through the trees. Bring them here, Zoe tells him. He and Travis don’t get back until nearly three am, when the village is dark and all the living are asleep, and when she opens door Zoe looks at the undead and grins.

“What?” Travis asks.

Zoe looks at Brian. “Don’t you remember these two?”

One’s wearing a pigeon-grey funeral suit, blood under his nails, and the other’s in a camouflage anorak, big face with an ox’s placid stubbornness. They’re the ones she and Brian released from the GP. Zoe remembers pulling at them, the alarm blaring, finally giving up to run. She hadn’t thought they made it out, after she heard what happened. She figured they’d been put down like dogs in the street, the way so many others had been. She’d released them as a sign of protest, to tell the living that the undead weren’t theirs to capture or keep or treat; it was her first real act of dissidence. The one in the anorak drifts forward, mouth opening: Haah, he says. Haaaaah.

“Who are you?” she says, half to herself as she steps to look it over. “What’s your name?”

“Look at his knee,” Brian says. He leans down to touch the undead’s trousers, the ragged hole of blood just below the kneecap. Someone’s shot him.

A hot wash of rage sweeps up her spine into her opening mouth, but nothing comes out. “Fucking….” Fucking pulse-beaters, who did similar things to all of them. Fucking Gary, who did it to this undead. “We’ll keep them here,” she says firmly, remembering something Simon said once, about cages and shame and hope. She might not believe in Simon anymore, but she believes in the Undead Prophet, and Simon was only ever mouthing his words. “We’ll treat them here.”

Travis hesitates. He’s a thin jackrabbit of a kid, barely nineteen, who cracked his head falling off his skateboard and then lingered in a coma for two weeks before his parents let him go. She doesn’t know if two weeks was too long or not enough to keep him at home with his parents, but he’s here, even if he’s hesitating.

“Spit it out,” she says.

“Only… is it a good idea?”

Her head snaps toward him, eyes narrowed to a predator’s sharp glare. “It’s my house. And it’s the right thing to do.”

So they put the two undead in her parents’ old room, though they look out of place among her mother’s pictures, her pressed flowers, her books on Astrology. Wandering round the woods for nearly five years has left their clothes in tatters, and the one in the anorak’s face is ravaged as well, in a way that even the Neurotriptylin won’t smooth out. Long scrapes of skin missing from his jawline, patches of flesh rotted from his cheeks. When Rick Macy came back they’d had to staple his head together, and this won’t be anything so dramatic but he’ll want the cover up, at least at first. Until she explains things to him.

She touches his face with her hands. “Things’ll turn out,” she says. “You’ll see.”

Travis has gone by the time she comes back out into the hallway, but Brian’s in the living room pulling off his shirt. He sometimes leaves things at her house - clothes mostly, but also books, folded bus tickets, a deck of playing cards where the royalty all have animal heads. A queen with a wolf’s face bursting from an embroidered collar. Mouth red, tongue red, teeth opening on nothing. The clothes Brian’s wearing now are ill-fitting and out of fashion, an old t-shirt and a pair of cargo trousers that make him look ten years younger than he is. She watches him change shirts, watches muscle stretch over unmarked skin. There’s paint splattered over one of his shoes, paint flecks in his hair, on the backs of his hands. That’s where he’s been. Painting over anti-undead graffiti, because she’d mentioned it once six days ago. He turns, sees her, starts.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry, were you…?”

She smiles. It feels soft, the vague peripheral awareness she sometimes gets of her skin, like she’s watching it happen to someone else, where a knife’s edge feels like a whisper.

 

 

 

 

She looks in on the undead sometimes, in the morning when she wakes up, at night before she goes to bed. They’re very quiet. They stand around her parents’ old bed and look out the window or at the walls; sometimes they make soft little noises at her like a pair of newborn colts. They let her give them shots. They don’t try to eat her.

She doesn’t know anything about them, not their names or where they’re from or what they used to do, before. Anorak is obviously a hunter, an avid one but maybe not very good, if it’s what killed him. It’s harder to tell, with the other one. He’s in a light grey funeral suit - white shirt, dark blue tie. She thinks one of his ears might be pierced, but she can’t be sure. They’re blank slates until they wake up and can talk for themselves, until she can talk to them, and tell them what has happened, what is happening to their people. She calls the one in the suit Henry. She calls the one in the anorak Samson, thinking of prayers and towers pulled down around her, of bodies in the rubble that bleed and do not rise.

In addition to the hole Gary put in his knee, he has a larger hole in his chest. Right side, fairly low. It must be what killed him. Probably entered his lung, and he died feeling like he was drowning. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore,” she tells him. Her voice is quiet, nearly a whisper. “’Blessed and holy are they that hath part in the resurrection. On such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ.’ You know what that means? It means you. It means me.”

He looks at her, his wide eyes like dark moor ice, his bitten lips, the ragged hole of his mouth opening. He breathes, softly. Says nothing. Says “Aaaah.”

 

 

 

 

The unaffiliated undead are less wary about coming over to Zoe’s house than to Simon’s. She remembers the convincing it sometimes took, the party in the woods that she now knows was just a cover for his questions. But everyone knows Zoe. She grew up with most of the younger undead, and saw the others around town; she used to babysit Frankie Kirby. It’s why Simon brought Amy back with him. It makes sense. Zoe’s not an outsider. But it doesn’t help her figure out who the first Risen is - only who it isn’t. It isn’t Ms. Furness, or Henry or Frankie or Rob or Julian Gorman; it’s not Cherie Edmondson or any of the others who used to work at the brothel before the council shut it down. She’s running out of names. It’s not Amy, who’s dead, or old lady Maggie; she hopes it’s not Freddie Preston. It can’t be Simon, and it’s not Zoe or Brian or Priscilla or Travis or Danny.

There’s a map pinned on her bedroom wall with pushpins in, marking off houses, households, people. There’s her flock. There’s Gary. There’s always Gary.

She’s seeing him around town more and more, in places he shouldn’t be or shouldn’t want to be. Too many times to be a coincidence. And then, late one night, outside her house. His car’s a few houses down but he’s standing just across the street, smoking. She didn’t know he smoked.

“You gonna just stand there?” she calls from the porch, mocking. “Let’s hear it then.” He’s an uncertain shape just outside the lamplight, faceless and dark and everything she hates. His boots make a soft thunking sound as he walks.

“You walk around here all satisfied like you think you own this town now,” he says, “but let me tell you something. I will die before I let you things live like the rest of us good, honest folk.”

Zoe’s eyebrows go up. “Oh so you’re good and honest now, are you?”

“I’m a _live_.” He steps closer. His breath gusts up against her face; she keeps staring at him. “You fucking Rotters were all the evil in the world. Mindless things, tearing folk apart with your teeth, and okay, you remember bits and pieces, but you don’t know how it was. Scared out of me mind, locked meself in the toilet for two days when it first started. I was engaged then. Didn’t know where she was, if she was alive or dead; the cell towers were going down and the internet up here’s always been shit. No one coming to help. Days went by and still, no one came to help. You lot killed and ate the people I loved like Sunday roasts, and now I’m expected to smile at you, ask you how’s your day been?”

Zoe grins, shifts her weight. Simon’s armor had been stony patience, but hers is bravado and fury and clenched fists at her sides. It is wanting to feel Gary’s cheekbone crack under her boot. Gary, curled up in the toilet. She can see it. She wants to see it for real. “We have just as much right to live as you do,” she says. “More, in fact; God wanted us moving about so much he brought us back from the dead.”

“Yeah, ‘cept you aren’t living, are you? You’re just…” his face scrunches up, disgusted, “existing.”

Something in her clenches, hard. The others won’t agree to an attack like what was done in London, with Blue Oblivion and Revelations, but she is trying. She believes in the cause. She won’t give up, and he’ll be the first to go once she convinces everyone. She’ll come into his house the way he came into Kieren’s, the way he came into Amy’s. She opens her eyes a little wider, leans forward until they’re nearly chest to chest, nose to nose, teeth bared. “Fuck you,” she says.

Gary stares at her, keeps staring at her, then huffs, an ugly little laugh from the back of his mouth. “Whatever.”

 

 

 

 

Give Back moves her group from graffiti to the graveyard, and since the living are a pack of prejudiced arseholes she knows it’s meant to be punishment. This is where they were supposed to make history, and now they're pulling weeds and scraping away moss, everything fenced off since mid December. Their minder has to let them in with a key. It’s not difficult work, but it’s tedious, and she’s sick of looking at headstones. All those names, all those dates. The white crosses of the Rising dead stand proud and straight in the east, judging her. In December she'd stood over them, Brian at her right and Travis at her left, the others behind her, righteous certainty swelling in her heart. Rise. Rise. Rise. The living are taunting them by putting them out here, but the others don’t see it that way. They don’t understand it at all.

They discuss it later at the house, Zoe leaning against the counter, everyone talking around her. Travis, Danny, and Priscilla too, a red-head who grew up in Blackpool listening to the waves pound rocks to dust. Zoe hasn’t seen her in nearly a week. She feels sometimes like she’s standing in a river and everyone else is fish slipping past her; every now and then she gets a smooth palmful of scales, but can’t quite close her hands around them. It’s not a feeling she likes.

“I wish you’d been sorted with me,” Travis is telling Priscilla. “We’re just pulling weeds, planting trees, making it look nice. It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t’ve minded doing for real.”

Priscilla nods. “They feel guilty,” she says, and Zoe’s not sure if she’s being sarcastic or not, because her voice doesn’t change. “My neighbor said hello to me this morning, and she didn’t even look like she was swallowing lemons. There’s talk of getting rid of Give Back, too.”

Zoe feels something in her snap, at that. Like there’s been something chained in her throat but the lead broke and now it’s rushing up, bursting out. “There’s only talk because of the work we’ve done here!” she says, pushing herself away from the counter. She’s sick of listening to this, sick of their lukewarm passion and excuses. “Because of what other undead have done in London, and Liverpool, and Edinburgh! Do you really think Give Back is gonna just go away on its own, now they’ve found a free work source?" They must hear the contempt she can't scrape out of her voice, because they’re all looking at the floor, the ceiling, their pale undead hands. “Next thing you know they’ll have us in factories, in sewers. They already have us cleaning houses.” She cuts a look at Brian, willing him to speak, to agree with her, but he just sits in guilty silence like the rest of them. “We have to take action,” she says, “and soon, before the next round of elections. People have to know we won’t just lie down and let them step all over us. We have to start fighting back. It’s all well and good to get together like this to talk, but ideas won’t win this war. Because it is a war we’re fighting out there, and this, right here, this is the fight that matters.”

Priscilla looks up. “We know. We weren’t saying it’s not important.”

Travis says, “But it’s getting better, isn’t it?” then stops when Priscilla elbows him in the side. “What?”

“Just, shut up for a second.”

Zoe’s hands clench at the rim of counter. “You all joined the ULA for a reason,” she says, forcing her voice even, knowing it still probably sounds too raw. “Think about what it was.” A moment passes, and then another. “Brian,” she says, and jerks her head toward the door.

The back hallway is dark and quiet, swelling voices filtering in from the kitchen. She can’t hear what they’re saying anymore, but she can hear Brian breathing. There’s not much room, and he’s standing with his back to the wall to give her the space she isn’t giving him, leaning in toward his face. He’s supposed to be her second in command. He’s supposed to support her.

“Why didn’t you back me up?” she asks.

Brian sighs. “I just don’t think this is the right course for us to take. And the others… they agree with me.”

“We’re the last line of defense, Brian,” she snarls. “Do you get what that means? Really?”

“Zoe, I still believe in what we’re doing.” He looks up, and this time he holds her gaze. He’s never been one to back down from her, which is why she likes him so much, but objecting to something and going over to the other side of the battle line are two very different things, and she can’t always be watching to see which way he’s slid. Brian sighs again. “It’s just, I’m tired. You know? And it was different, with Simon. I never signed up for this.”

Her teeth snap together, bone to bone. Simon’s name stings. What did he ever do for the cause? He might have gathered them together but he left those two undead locked up at the GP, he let Gary go at the Legion, he didn’t go through with the Second Rising. “Never signed up for what - _success_? This is the _only_ way we can change things.”

Brian drops his eyes, sighs. She’s still leaning toward him, pressed in so close she’d be able to smell him if she still could. Close enough to kiss. Would that make him stay?

“I know.” He reaches up, presses the heel of his palm to his forehead. “I know.”

 

 

 

 

It’s not the best way to part with him, but she can’t stay here anymore. She ducks back into the kitchen, tells Travis to lock up when they leave, and then goes out. She forgets to put on a jacket, but that’s just fine, because she doesn’t need it, will never need it, even if it snows and all the living freeze solid in their beds. She can’t drown, or have a heart attack, or get sick, either. She can survive a bullet, a bomb, a knife in her back. She is indestructible. Immortal. Incorruptible.

At the eastern edge of town there are fields and then a road and then the forest, with a phone booth at the edge of it lit up like a spaceship. Take me to your leader, she thinks. Take me home. In her pocket, there’s a folded scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled across it.

It takes a long time for the other end to pick up. There’s no answer, but the low hum of electricity tells her someone’s there, even if she can’t hear them breathing.

“Hello, this is Zoe Kelly? From Roarton?” Still nothing. “You said to call this number if anything happened and I -” She swallows, looks up at the ceiling. She can’t cry but there’s an itchy prick at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to right now and I need - I need something. Because I’m losing them. The others. They’re settling. They’ve lost sight of what we have to accomplish and I can’t steer them right again.” She squeezes the phone in one hand, clutches the edge of her jacket in the other. “What should I do?”

There’s a long, crackling silence. And then the line goes dead.

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t know if someone’s coming, or if she should keep checking the mail, or if the Prophet’s given up on her, or what. So she waits. Talks to the two undead. Checks the mail six times a day, and thinks about calling again. He’d called her his daughter, hadn’t he? He’d said she was faithful.

She takes walks up to the ridge just north of town, where she can see the village sprawled out at her feet the way she used to sit at Simon’s, and stares out at the turning specks of the living going about their business. One of those houses is hers, though. One of them is Brian’s. In one of those houses, Simon and Kieren are snogging on a couch, happier together than she has been in months. On Thursday she meets Brian at the Legion because he asks her to, although she doesn't like it there and it’s a bad idea. Medium wood, jukebox, full of pulse-beaters. But she likes to sit in the armchairs, likes to see the imprint her body made against the cushions when she stands.

“Get us drinks, would you?” she tells Brian.

He shrugs. “If you want.”

He doesn’t see the point of it. But it’s a kind of sleight-of-hand, a misdirection; if they’re going to be here at least people won’t see them and immediately think undead. They can talk more freely. Except she doesn’t know what she’s going to say to him that she hasn’t already, in the hallway of her house or in his, nothing he hasn’t heard the Prophet say online. She’ll tell him her plan, then try to talk him into it, but she doesn’t know what he wants to say to her that couldn’t be said somewhere else. There are those two awful women at the other side of the room and an ex-HVF guy at the arcade games. And Gary’s just coming out of the bathroom, hands too dry and a grimace already creeping over his face. His table’s halfway across the room, but she still hears him say “Fucking Rotter,” as he sits, staring, knocking back the rest of his beer and then calling for another.

“Here you go,” Brian says, sliding her drink across the table.

She raises an eyebrow. “Green iced tea.”

He shrugs. “I remember you saying you liked it.”

“Yeah, when I had taste buds.” Which is true, but also unfair. He’s holding a cup of tea between his palms like he can actually feel the warmth, but Zoe still does yoga. She sighs. Thinks of apologizing, but doesn’t. She doesn’t know what to say. He’s trying, but not in the right way, and she’s told him so but he doesn’t seem to get it, or care enough - or maybe it’s that he cares about the wrong things.

“We still have all that Blue Oblivion from December,” she says, eyes flicking up. “I want to use it.” He doesn’t disappoint. Furrow between his eyebrows, mouth opening on a caution she cuts off before he starts it. “On Easter. The village usually does something in the square and I don’t care if I have to do it myself, Brian, I am sick of sitting around doing nothing. We’re supposed to be a vehicle for change, but I don’t see any change happening around here.”

“Zoe….”

She closes her eyes, hard, and he trails off. “I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “Just back me up, the way you’re supposed to, the way you said you were going to.”

“It’s just, it’s not that simple, is it.”

“It’s exactly that simple.”

His voice rises a little, then drops down to a whisper as he speaks, his body leaned forward across the table. “Look, Zoe, I don’t want to be treated like dirt either, but I also don’t think we should have to kill people to get them to accept us. It’s only going to cause more problems.”

“Victus is gaining more support every day, Brian - you watch the news. 97 Victus MPs, and who knows how many sympathizers in the House of Lords. We’re out of options. We have to make this world ours. Why do I have to do everything myself?”

“Zoe, I….” He spread his hands, a helpless gesture, and she knows he’s out of words, that he’s said everything he can say to her and it’s still not enough. She knows; she feels the same. They sit there, silent, and she waits for him to do something, for something to push her into action. Brian, though, has gone still, head turned a little to the side. Behind them, Gary’s still talking. She’s sort of tuned him out but she could hear the gist of what he’s saying. It’s nothing new. It’s the same shit the anti-undead graffiti around town has been saying about them for months. But his voice is loud and nasty, and Brian’s listening hard. This is the kind of thing they have to fight, she thinks, pulls her hand into a fist. Fucking Gary fucking following her everywhere - on her walks up to the ridge, on errands around town; sometimes he stops by Give Back, even, just to stare at her.

“Come on,” Brian says suddenly, standing, “let’s go.”

She stops. Looks at him with his jacket in one hand and his white eyes on her, waiting. “I want to stay,” she says.

“Zoe -“

“I’m staying.” She turns back toward Gary, meeting his disgusted look with a hot, steady glare, like having a staring contest with an angry bull on the other side of plexiglass. “We shouldn’t walk away from him,” she says. “It sends the wrong message.”

Silence.

And then Brian pulls his jacket from the back of his chair. She looks at him, certain for a moment that he’s going to walk over to Gary, but he heads toward the door instead. Glances back at her once, in apology or maybe plea - but he leaves. And Gary smirks.

Her green tea bottle crunches in her hand.

She knows what happened the one time Simon came to the Legion, but she’s never had his self-control, never had his subtlety. And he’s never had her resolve. Because Brian’s gone, now; the Prophet abandoned her; her flock is slipping through her hands like so many fish. There’s a heated pressure settling in her lower back, just along her spine, and Gary’s halfway across the room and then he isn’t.

Being undead hasn’t made her any stronger. But the imperviousness to pain - to pulled joints, torn ligaments, an elbow to her stomach - makes fighting easier. She shoves him down and then they’re sprawling, and the pub is a roar around them. Gary traps her hands so she headbutts him in the face; someone grabs her arm and she wrenches it back. Something in there pops. She can hear it, but it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t stop her from shoving Gary’s sleeve up and sinking her teeth into him.

She can’t taste it, of course. Can’t feel the warm blood in her mouth, the soft slick of flesh, like chicken meat. But she can see the red smear on his arm when she pulls back, and Gary’s making this long gasping noise that breaks into a whine at the end. Simon wouldn’t do something like this. Simon wouldn’t even think about doing this. “I don’t need Blue Oblivion to fuck you up,” she says. Thinks of something else, of Gary curled up in a tub as the world falls down around him, and she leans closer, whispers, “We are everything you’re afraid of.” White eyes, white skin, red mouth, bloody. Pearl Pinder still hasn’t reached for her gun.

The pub around her is miraculously quiet, all eyes on her as she pushes herself up with her left arm - it hangs weird and she knows it’s probably dislocated, doesn’t look down to see as she turns and goes out into the night.

She walks home alone, quickly, on a fading tide of adrenaline. Dark cars. Dark alleys. It’s the middle of February and there’s snow on the ground, caked up into her boots, the folds of her trousers at the ankles. She lets herself into the house, turns on a light. The two undead are moving about in her parents’ old room, the slow shuffle of feet like sleepwalkers’. They should have been turning back by now, but she doesn’t know what’s taking so long. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next. She’s still in her jacket, her snow-caked trousers, her boots, laced up tight.

It’s quiet, but she’s still standing.


End file.
